In an interview with GI.biz, David Reeves, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, spoke about the upcoming PSP Slim/Lite and the PSP’s functionality with games.
While we have known about the PSP Lite for a few months, Reeves is predicting that once the PSP Lite goes on sale, the reception won’t be as high as the DS but on-par with the PSP Starter pack.
While yes, fans will certainly be happy about the newer and slimmer version, Reeves says the PSP ended up being marketed towards a different demographic. Hopefully the PSP Lite will change that.
"The research that we did showed us that actually PSP wasn’t so mobile – people were maybe using it at home. There were two reasons for that – one is they didn’t want to use it outside because they were afraid that it would be stolen, particularly in the UK…The other reason was they said – particularly females – they said it’s a little bit heavy, and the males said it won’t quite go in my top pocket or inside-jacket."
When asked about the PSP’s functionality with games, Reeves responded saying they marketed the handheld with too many services and not enough backing of the services. "…when we launched, that rightly or wrongly it was also a media device, but actually 80 to 90 percent of the people just bought this to play games on. And we didn’t have the services, so we took this decision maybe a year ago…"
Reeves admits that the PSP should have had more original games and that the PSN (PlayStation Network) will be out to change that. Games for the PSP will be more of a primary focus with Sony and gamers could just get games straight off of PSN and transfer it over to the PSP.
"Honestly, probably we should have had more original PSP games, and there were some PS2 ports of course, but what you’re going to see now is – on PSN there are a lot of good, original games, so the situation you might be seeing in the future is some of those games coming onto PSP. They might be shorter, but they would be far more original."
Don’t forget that Europeans will get a downloadable video service for the PSP in 2008.
